(Via Center for American Progress)

House Republicans are asking low- and middle-income families to sacrifice health care and basic services to preserve redundant defense systems:

• They are prepared to slash funding for child and elder abuse prevention, Meals on Wheels, and foster care to keep a helicopter that costs five times as much as similar models yet is not much more effective.
• They are willing to raise taxes on the families of 5.5 million low-income children to purchase two submarines that are unnecessary to maintain our naval superiority.
• They are ready to force hundreds of thousands of working families to forgo health coverage in order to block any cuts to a nuclear stockpile whose size is largely a relic of the Cold War.

Here’s the background: The House Republican budget instructs the Ways and Means Committee to find $53 billion in savings in order to “protect national security from deep and indiscriminate cuts” that would otherwise take place in January 2013 due to the debt deal agreed to last summer. On April 17 the committee set forth their package, which exceeded the target. It proposes $68 billion in cuts and tax increases for low- and middle-income Americans.

The chart below gives a side-by-side comparison of the cuts to low- and middle-income families that House conservatives are proposing in order to shield wasteful military spending from automatic cuts in the debt deal.

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